To look at the magazines David Carson designs - from Surfer to Beach Culture to the new Ray Gun - you might imagine a tough guy who surfs all day and stays up all night listening to strange new music. But the real Carson is a calm, reasonable and thoughtful man. This designer, whose influence reaches far beyond the beach and new music scenes, once studied for a time in Switzerland, home of clean sans-serif types and grid-like modernist layouts - as full of open space as the Alps themselves.
"I could do Modern Maturity, or Golf Digest," he said. "They wouldn't look like Ray Gun or Beach Culture, but there would be some tweaks." Among the designers he most admires is Fabien Baron, who recently lent a stately open new look to Harper's Bazaar. Computers have changed the world of magazine design, but not in the mainstream.
The New Yorker has been translated to, but not transformed by, the Macintosh. Carson's work is testimony to the unexpected and surprising consequences of technology: that a neato, cute machine like the Macintosh could enable grit and grunge, sand and sin. Carson's magazines are Macintosh-inspired palimpsests, where the effects of scanners and programs such as Photoshop produce a mysterious and funky depth.
They are sooty windows with out-of-focus details that become abstract graphics and layers of type fading into each other, as if someone has wired a cable full of channels onto a single TV screen. Words double or echo, drift or stop short, as if someone were rapidly tuning a remote control. Carson prefers deadpan, tough, tattoo-like typefaces, wiry as the killers in a film noir.
He often samples the new generation of underground typefaces created at art schools, showcasing them like a Bill Graham of grunge bands. For Ray Gun, his visuals fit the music reviewed within. The pages are like a multi-track recording, a kind of controlled sampling of visual noise from a photograph, manipulated, stretched or squeezed. Call him the house party DJ of imagery.
There is a method to Carson's apparent madness. Almost all his treatments are inspired by an idea or phrase in the writing or subject. And he considers his audience. Younger readers, Carson observed without approval or disapproval, have grown up watching MTV and reading USA Today. They have shorter attention spans. So articles tend to fit onto a single page. And even longer articles in Ray Gun share one thing with those in The New Yorker: They never "jump" to the magazine's back pages, but proceed unbroken
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Ray Gun also lacks page numbers, a fact, Carson noted, that went unremarked upon in the 50-odd letters the editors received after the first issue. Readers must tilt the magazines to read headlines, "knock outs," and even the articles themselves, and squint through layers of type. But these are engaging facts: They make the magazine, Carson said, more like an object - more solid.
